LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Girl Who Drank the Moon, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family and Love
Storytelling, Censorship, and Control
Memory, Forgetting, and the Future
Sorrow vs. Hope
Summary
Analysis
The parent tells the child about the Witch’s Seven League Boots. Like all magic, they’re not good or bad; they just allow the wearer to travel far in an instant. This is why the Witch can steal children and elude capture. Long ago, the Witch was a child. That changed when she found the boots. With the boots, she stole magic from other magicians and then from the moon. Then, she put a cloud of sorrow over everyone. This is why the world is gray, and why hope is only for children.
This story implies that what Fyrian brought back from his dream was the Seven League Boots. By giving the reader access to this story and allowing them to put together how all of this works, the novel implies that readers should seek information from various different sources, look for bias and ulterior motives, and discover for themselves what’s true.